


How I Wonder What You Are

by MiraiRah



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Amnesia, Body Modification, Captivity, Extremis, Graphic Language, Human Experimentation, Kidnapping, M/M, Medical Trauma, Minor Tony Stark/Clint Barton - Freeform, Multiple Pov, Original Characters - Freeform, Sexual Content, Tony Stark 2.0, Universe Alterations, Violence, Winter Soldier In Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 17:11:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8218469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiraiRah/pseuds/MiraiRah
Summary: He awoke in an alley, buried under a centimetre of snow, to the feeling of its malicious sting against his naked body. Sloughing the ice crusted over his eyes, he saw at last that he was drenched in blood, filtered black in the light of the blue star shining from his chest.Without his memories, he isn’t really Tony Stark. As time moves on and they start coming back, after vivid dreams and violent headaches, he still isn’t Tony Stark, not really. He knows his own name and he knows he’s missing, but it feels like another life, a past life. His plans to start again go off the rails when a familiar face starts to seek him out, a former Hydra lab-rat like himself, who seems to think they know each other.His anonymity is further compromised when SHIELD sends its own welcoming committee, including one crazy agent determined to make him into one of the good guys, lest the bad guys get him first.If there's one thing everyone can agree on, it's that Tony Stark isn't quite human. Not anymore.





	

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has been a hell of a journey, and I can say I learned a few things about myself along the way. Moderation was not one of those things.  
> I was a little vague with my tagging, mostly because I don't like spoiling the plot of my stories when they actually have a plot to spoil, but also because I don't see the need sometimes. In regards to the tags I _have_ used - this is not a gentle story, and the characters are not always kind... Enjoy!
> 
> [This was originally written for the WinterIron Bang on Tumblr, but I had some unexpected technical difficulties this past few months. This story has been sitting in my drafts for a few weeks and I'm publishing the first chapter just to make sure it doesn't get deleted, but it might be a few more before I get around to updating it. I travel a lot for work, and most of my free time is spent sleeping or working on an original manuscript, but the story has sixteen (much longer) chapters and it is completed, I just need to edit it.]

“The more a thing is perfect,  
the more it feels pleasure and pain."  
_— Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy)_

 

 

###  _Rejuvenation: I_

 

 

He awoke in an alley, buried under a centimetre of snow, to the feeling of its malicious sting against his naked body. Sloughing the ice crusted over his eyes, he saw at last that he was drenched in blood, filtered black in the light of the blue star shining from his chest. There are other details he cannot recall with confidence, such as the distant horn of a boat ready to dock in the harbour, and the taste of muddy water and bad salt air combined on his broken lips. There is concrete grit pricking into his knees and the palms of his hands, and a pair of shallow grazes on his left shoulder – this he can recall because _this is_ _pain_ , the utmost physical proof of his existence. He’s alive, though he cannot remember how or why it is important, or what it means that he exists.

These small wounds cannot explain all of the blood. He concludes it mustn’t belong to him, even if there are no others in sight. His instincts tell him this is normal, that others will bleed the same as him if he makes them, that so long as he can fight he can also survive.

When he opens his mouth to speak his name no words come forth, no identity, no memory. He is no one who remembers nothing.

He was born that wintery evening without language and context, just the sense of knowledge that persisted beyond all grasp, retained behind the wall of his amnesia. He knows not what he knows, just that he no longer knows it, and that each thing that has a name is familiar to him, unpleasant but familiar, and this is his awakening. He knew without knowing that he would have to go toward the golden aura of the streetlamps to find others. Just as he knew without knowing that he was naked, wet, bloody, and cold, none of which he wanted to be, nor should he be beyond this birthing place. This alley is his womb, and he has taken his first breath abandoned and alone, just as he will take his first steps unaided, and resist confusion with all of its darkening dread.

It's not quite fear that sends him stumbling on bare feet through the ice and snow, away from the illuminated street, deeper into the darkness, but something compels him to hide, to run away – something not all men are born with.

He longs for survival.

 

  

###  _Rejuvenation: II_

 

 

To exist in a place without the meaning of time, to be rooted in absent concepts that have no name, concepts like abandonment and danger, was not without the presence of confusion. He did not understand what he didn’t understand, and so ignorance became a paradox. That isn’t to say he was afraid.

No, fear did not consume him in the first hour, when he wriggled through a broken fence of diamond mesh and caught the skin of his wrist on a loose piece of wire, when he walked on raw feet over ice and gravel, crept around the outside of a darkened weather-boarded house to barge inside. There was nobody else taking shelter in the small building, left feeling chilly by the draught and vacant by the lack of life, any personal effects of the owner unnoticed by that first cursory glance. He chose this place for its barrenness no matter how much he longed for the liveliness of the town instead. Squeezing into the bathroom, he recoils momentarily from the blinding white of its tiles and walls, but takes comfort in the enclosed glass cubical and the plastic shower nozzle with its looping hose. The water handles are also plastic, the hot water knob cracking at his first touch while the cold water one springs off the wall and into his hand, though he manages to screw it and the washer back on tighter than before. Fascinated, he watches mud and blood and dead blades of grass slipping free from his body under the spray, vanishing down the drain until the water runs clear and his skin is flushed and clean, watches his toes wriggle and curl at his command.

Fear did not consume him in the second hour, either. He sees his face for the first time in the foggy bathroom mirror, and cannot help but stare. Had he never seen his reflection before? His face is not familiar to him, not the way shower knobs and light switches were, except perhaps his eyes. He knew those belonged to him for certain. His chin is faintly bearded, hair and irises as dark and textured as the earth. His amazement doesn’t translate into his expression – he sees a stern man in the looking glass, a _foreign_ man. Perturbed, he examines his features, stretching his jaw wide to survey his teeth, pulling his eyelids apart to better observe the ribbons of gold that lace outward from his pupils, testing the groups of muscles needed to form a frown or a smile, stretches his neck to watch the tendons flicker below the skin. The animation of his flesh consumes him.

So caught up in staring at himself, it takes some time before he realises his wounds – the soreness of his hands, the abrasion on his shoulder – were closed, silver like old scars, already well on their way to healing.

He feels a great many things. He does not feel fear.

 

He becomes uncomfortable with his nakedness as time progresses. Clothing feels most natural to him, a discovery that started with a fist-sized bundle of fabric that unravelled into a pair of socks. After hustling up some clothes a size too large for his body and stretched around the waist he leaves his place of shelter. It's still dark outside, and there is still a chill of frost in the air, but the world is less unfamiliar this time. He recognises what a street is, even if he can't yet call it a street in his own mind. Lights draw him in, as do the noises he believes to be vocalisations by others like him - _other_ _people_ \- and it is by following these instincts he comes across a building, one amongst many, only this one seems glad for the shroud of night. It's crowded with people, unlike the dozens of other buildings that remain lifeless.

The entrance to the building yawns open with an exhale of percussive music and yelling, expelling a trio of women and a man onto the damp pavement, all four more youthful than him. He rushes inside before the mouth of the building closes again, glass doors swinging shut with a whine. The four who just left are already stumbling away in the opposite direction without paying him any mind.

For all of the stimulus the bar contains, it isn't all that much to take in, not when he is already curious about everything as is. Piece by piece his mind starts to draw its own conclusions, seeing pairs and small groups of men and women gathered around separate tables, isolated in their small packs. Hardly any spared him a glance even after he'd stood in the one place and gawked at his surroundings, none of the ones who bothered to look at him taking any interest. The first person to speak directly to him is a woman even more segregated than him, being that she is mostly hidden behind the bar when he eventually makes his way to it. She spots him, and dismisses him almost as quickly, returning to rubbing a cloth over a glass in her hands.

"What do you want?" She asks. She only sets the glass back down to acknowledge him properly when another man also behind the bar wanders closer.

His mouth moves before he realises he's doing it, parroting the words, quieter and without inflection: “What do you want."

She seems displeased by his response, but the man ushers her out of the way and takes her place. His lips break apart to bare his teeth in a smile, hands low but uncomfortably invisible behind the rise of the bar between them. The man seems to see how his smile and this venue in its entirety have become too much all at once. In an instant he is overwhelmed by the sense that he shouldn't be here. The man speaks softer than he'd expected, considering the other men of similar stature throughout the bar are peripherally loud and unaware of their huge presences. “Who’re you here with, buddy?”

Every word takes form, and for some reason the sentence makes sense, even if only moments ago he'd never have been able to recall a single one. First he peers either side of himself, but sees nobody else. The reply is automatic. “What?”

The man is not yet discouraged. “My name’s Shannon," he says, "what’s yours?”

“My name?”

“Yeah.” Seeing he isn't getting any real response, Shannon blows out a patient breath. “You look kind of wet. I didn’t think it was raining outside. Do you have anyone I can call?”

“Do I what?”

“Is there anyone missing you. A friend or some family I can call? No?”

“No.”

The bartender looks frustrated now. He has the sudden urge to leave, not liking knowing he'd caused that look on the man trying to talk to him, but Shannon doesn't seem interested in sending him away.

“What am I going to do with you? Okay, can you wait here for a few minutes?” He looks away from Shannon's dulling smile, but doesn’t move despite the doubts that this was not where he wanted to be anymore.

After a few minutes bickering with the woman while his hand rested on the hand piece of a wall-mounted phone, he loses interest in trying to follow their discussion. Some words return to him swifter than others, so attempting to listen to what they are saying is pointless when all their meanings become jumbled. He knows the context is that they are trying to decide where they should call in order to attend to him. His presence seems burdensome somehow.

He leaves just as unobtrusively as he comes in, slipping off while Shannon's back is turned and while the other people could hardly care less.

Back out on the street, with golden lights winking between the grooves of the wet pavement as he strays away, he tries to think, running over all his new words in his mind over and over, but only winds up frustrating himself when no more of his language reveals itself to him. Things are less alien now, in that he's aware of their purposes in the most abstract sense, as opposed to being confounded by the function of a fence other than to hinder him on his path. The cold creeps down his collar and under his sleeves with invasive fingers, but with a shiver he is warm again all over, from the inside out. For a moment the lights reflected on the road seem to brighten, particularly around his feet, as though the source is above or inside him.

“Hey, you!"

He keeps walking, uninterested. Whoever it is that called out to him hurries across the street to follow, their gait heavy and even.

"Hey, I’m talking to you!”

Instinct is the prickling of his skin when this new stranger gets too close, awareness like a slow river that flows through his senses to wash insidiously against the nape of his neck. He is in danger. Every particle of him is seething with it, this rage, that someone would dare-

How he becomes so spatially aware in an instant is a mystery - as if his mind was an external presence for the briefest moment, only for that grip to escape him - but it matters none at all when he turns and snatches a heavy metal object - _a weapon_ \- out of the person's hand. They do not look like the other men from the bar, whoever they are, for he can see no visible skin. Their clothes are blacker than the sky, and a helmet with a glass visor reflects his own face back at himself, distorted but true. Their attempt on him is not deterred despite their lack of weapon, not considering how swiftly they reach for another one, longer this time and braced against their hip. The weapon he'd stolen on reflex he knows is for killing, specifically for discharging metal bullets to pierce the body. Just as he knows the weapon the stranger is now reaching for contains electricity meant to stun.

He calculates the density of the gun, adjusts his grip, then strikes the man across the side of the visor, shattering the tinted glass. The smooth exterior of the helmet cracks.

In the far, far distance, there is a siren.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part of the story is set Post-Avengers, after the attack by Loki. For reference, Iron Man wasn't involved in the fight.  
> As mentioned in the first note, it might be a little while before I get a chance to update, but the second chapter is a lot longer.


End file.
